At present, an operating company reduces network bandwidth pressure in a manner of deploying a mobile value-added service network to improve Quality of Experience (QoE) of a user, and provides value-added services. A service link of a mobile value-added service network mainly includes two modes as shown in FIG. 1:
Mode 1: service enablers are statistically linked together, traffic is required to pass through all the service enablers in the service link, and a mobile gateway usually adopts Access Point Names (APNs) to distinguish different service links; and
Mode 2: all the service enablers are connected to a centralized traffic routing controller, and after being processed by each service enabler, the traffic returns to the centralized controller to determine a next hop.
In mode 1, a network topology among the service enablers corresponding to each APN is relatively static, even the service enablers are fixedly connected in series to form a service chain, adding or removing a service enabler or simply changing a logic of the service chain may cause a change in the network topology, and may bring many problems to service deployment and management of an operating company. Dependence of the network topology directly causes manual configuration complexity and causes the service enablers merely to be deployed according to a set sequence without changes (although there are no limits made to an execution sequence of many service enablers), which makes it difficult to achieve adaptability to elastic and rapid service deployment changes; and
in mode 2, a CAPital eXpenditure (CAPX) is relatively high, and all the traffic always determines the next hop by the centralized controller, which may cause existence of a repeated function with a packet gateway.
In order to solve the problem, a service chain routing solution is proposed in the industry, and as shown in FIG. 1, the solution includes the following network element equipment:
traffic classification network element equipment, mainly responsible for performing service identification and service chain selection on a received data message and inserting a corresponding service chain label into the data message, specifically referring to FIG. 2;
service orchestration network element equipment, mainly responsible for orchestrating a sequence of service nodes which are connected in series in a service chain;
network control network element equipment, mainly responsible for maintaining and managing a network topology and service chain routing table of a mobile value-added service network; and
a switch, mainly responsible for receiving the data message and forwarding the data message according to the service chain routing table.
However, not all nodes of a mobile value-added service network support service chain routing, as shown in FIG. 3 and FIG. 4, service node 2 in FIG. 3 does not support a service chain routing mechanism, which may cause a routing failure of service chain path 2, and switch 2 in FIG. 4 does not support the service chain routing mechanism, which may also cause a service chain routing failure.
For the problem of high rate of service chain routing failure caused by an incapability of a conventional node, of a mobile value-added service network, not supporting a service chain routing mechanism in a related art, there is yet no effective solution.